Fantasy Football Draft Geek

Well... Draft #2 is in the books.

This league is a 10 team, Point Per Reception League (PPR). I was lucky enough to get the #1 draft pick. At first I was very excited about this since I was able to grab LaDanian Tomlinson with my first pick. The problem I had with picking first is that players never seemed to drop to me, or I felt like I had to make a pick too early for fear it wouldn't be there next time around. Aside from picking my QB hunch too early (David Garrard in the 7th round), I feel like I had a pretty good draft.

My strategy going in was to avoid the high priced QBs and go for more of a QuarterBack by Committee approach. The reason I opted for this strategy is that due to the scoring for this league, QB is not a high scoring position. Also this league rewards rushing a little more. Because of this David Garrard (more of a Rushing QB) ended up ranked 5th on my QB list. I knew based on my research that David Garrard is usually drafted late 8th round or early 9th. Because of my draft position I was not sure I would be able to get Garrard on the last pick of the 8th round. Since Garrard was pretty much a center piece of my strategy for this league I opted to jump the gun and grab him in the 7th round (1st pick). This, as expected, was met by many taunts. The same people who taunted me for taking Tony Romo in the 10th round last year!! We know how that ended up.

All in all I feel the rest of my draft went fairly well. Here are my picks. Feel free to let me know what you think!

1-1 LaDanian Tomlinson
2-10 Larry Fitzgerald
3-1 Larry Johnson
4-10 Plaxico Burress
5-1 Calvin Johnson
6-10 Tony Gonzalez
7-1 David Garrard
8-10 Julius Jones
9-1 Ronnie Brown
10-10 Chris Johnson
11-1 Vikings Defense
12 - 10 Jake Delhomme
13 - 1 Javon Walker
14-10 Sidney Rice
15 -1 Reggie Williams
16-10 LJ Smith
17-1 Steven Gostkowski
18-10 Jacksonville Defense

First a little background about myself:
I started playing Fantasy Football about 7 years ago and have been hooked ever since. I am an IT consultant for a small company in Baltimore (yes I love the Ravens). In the past 3-4 years I've decided to actually create my own drafting strategy as opposed to bringing a magazine to the draft and thinking I was prepared. I am a "numbers guy" (you may call me a geek), so I was always curious how I could leverage that knowledge to help prepare me for my fantasy football drafts.

In the Beginning:
In my first season I brought only a magazine to my draft... I felt completely unprepared. It amazes me that so many players still do this very same thing today. It was immediately apparent to me that I had to come up with a better way. For my second season, I decided to create a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet to help organize my draft. It started out simple enough... it was just spreadsheet with a worksheet for each position and one for overall rankings.
I found 3 sources for player rankings (whether online or magazine). I entered all of the rankings in for each player/source. I then averaged out those rankings and sorted the player based on the average rank. My theory being that one source may be too high or too low on a particular player, and that by averaging them out we would come out with a more "likely" rank. In addition one source may be aware of some nugget of information that another is not.

Surprisingly, that strategy actually paid off the next season when I won one of my leagues. I say "surprisingly" because in hindsight, although it addressed one problem with player rankings, it was still woefully flawed. (More on this later)

Another flaw in the "bring a magazine to the draft" draft strategy is this. Magazines are outdated by the time they hit the stands!
In just about every case the magazine is printed before the minicamps even start. I do still buy a couple magazines, but one thing I always look for is free (or cheap) internet updates.

One Magazine that I use religiously is Fantasy Index Magazine. This magazine does provide a free internet update, however if you want the latest, greatest most up to date information you will have to pay. In my opinion it is well worth it to pay for these updates as it includes team/player insights, player rankings, stats and projections. (More on these later)

More recently:
Although my first crack at improving my draft was an okay start, I knew there was a lot lacking.
The problem became more apparent to me when I began to join multiple leagues. Each league had it's own scoring system and nuances. How could one list apply equally for all scoring systems? Answer: It Can't!

So I decided what was really needed was a way to project how many points a player would give me for a particular scoring format. So I did some searching and found projected stats for each player. Borrowing off of my idea from my first spreadsheet, I decided to find 3 projection sources and to take an average to avoid ranking a player too high (or too low).

I believe I left my spreadsheet this way for a couple of seasons with minor tweaks here and there.

Something was still missing...

Every year I had a good idea of how all my RBs stacked up against each other, how my WRs stacked up against each other, etc. When it came time to creating a merged list I always had problems.

You cant base it solely on the projected points because almost always QBs score the most points... So why do RBs usually get drafted first??? Answer: Supply and Demand.
There are less good running backs to go around, especially considering in most formats you must start at least 2 RBs. To make the situation worse there is a bigger drop-off in points after the first tier of RBs. If you look at the projected points of all of your RBs you'll likely notice that it drops off much more sharply than QBs. This is probably due to several reasons. One of which is the increased number of teams employing a "Running Back By Committee" approach in which a team uses 2 or more RBs. That is why it is usually a sound strategy to grab RBs early. I've found that creating a graph to show this dropoff can be very helpful to mapping out a strategy for draft day.

There had to be some other way to compare a RB to WR to a QB and determine which one is more "valuable". After some google searches, I found my answer: "Value Based Drafting".

Value Based Drafting (VBD) gives you a way to do exactly that: Determine a players value regardless of the position they play.

This discovery was, by far, the best thing that happened to my draft prep. That year I won 2 leagues and came in 2nd in the other (not a bad year at all). The year after I came in 2nd in one league and 3rd in the other 2. Yes that is a drop-off from the previous year's results, but I made the playoffs with all 6 of my teams over those 2 seasons... I can't complain one bit.

The best thing of all is that the people in my leagues are now absolutely terrified of me!
I will be writing more about VBD in a future post. In the meantime if you would like to find out more, type "Value Based Drafting" in the Fantasy Football Draft Tip Search in the upper right-hand corner of this page.

Stay Tuned:
I have touched very briefly on some of the strategies I have employed over the years.
In up coming posts I will go more into detail on these individual strategies.
I've also been incorporating some new concepts this year, that I will be writing about as well.
So stay tuned... there is more to come.